Stressful and liberating in (almost) equal measure!

As a self employed artist the responsibility is all mine, the paperwork is ghastly, the erratic income quite worrying.  You can be quite isolated. You have to be very self-motivated and think about your own time management/tax/finance/national insurance/pension/marketing/advertising/insurance/planning permissions etc all of which seem to take up an inordinate amount of time! And you tend not to be able to leave work behind at 5pm...

You do have flexibility, autonomy, freedom to choose where when and how hard to work (the choice may be between very hard and extremely hard). Most of the self employed people I know in the arts world don't earn much money.

There are lots of life style options when you are not tied to someone else's agenda - home exchanges, housesitting, residencies, a few months solid graft and a few months travel. One or the other partner if you are in a relationship working, while the other takes creative time out, or both partners working part-time and living on less.
 
I did think for quite a long time that money didn't really matter. It does!! It gives you choices.
 
I wouldn't change it for anything! I think I basically just don't like someone else telling me what to do :)

Are you, have you been, or are you thinking of becoming self-employed? What do you think are the pros and cons?

I love it!

I feel incredibly lucky to have the chance to live here for a month and work on writing a novel. But there is a sense in which it is not only luck. I took the chance when it was most generously offered, something I have not always done. We can so easily say' I can't possibly' and find umpteen reasons why we can't follow a dream.

I have chosen to be self employed which of course has its disadvantages (of more anon) but for me the greatest advantage is the amount of choice I have about how, when and where to work.

We often have more freedom than we think.

And we sometimes say no, when, with just a little more courage we could say yes.

Where ther's a will there is often a way....

Would you agree?

Do you have dreams yet to be fulfilled?